Used only in situations where you wish to confuse, impress (When you really do not), or if you're just too lazy to say it all. There is a plague on the englishlanguage adding complexity where is is not needed.

Recently (Which is a very relative word) A LOT of acronyms have apeared in the techindustry, adding confusion to a lot of un-educated users, for example "My 466 MHz with 128 Meg's of SDRAM running RH Linux 6.1 needs to be fixed, everything from its AGP video card right to its CPU. My CD-RW is broken, however my original CD-ROM works fine. The software end is no better, KDE is evil, as is GNOME. I'm considering swiching to Win98 & LS, however I'd lose my settings for my HTTPd & FTPd...." (It goes on and on.... For example: In Programming: HTML, XHTML, CSS, OBJ, XML, XUL, C, C++, ASM, VB, JS, VBS, VBX, VBA, MOD, LISP, COBOL.... and so on). You (and I as well) should not blame just the tech fields for the acronym dilemma (they are only a part), legal fields, and business fields are also large contributors (Example: AAC, APC, LLC, etc).

Acronyms are a tool to simplify and not confuse, it should be kept that way.

Usage

To use the acronym tag, simply place opening and closingHTML tags around the letters, and use the title attribute to specify the long description of what each of the letters stand for (it's a good idea to also add the "lang" attribute). For example:

On browsers that support this tag, this will typically cause a tooltip to appear containing the title attribute when the mouse is placed over the words "NATO&quot or "RADAR".

Everything2 Support?

E2 doesprovidelimitedsupportfor the acronym tag. In addition to the tag itself, Everything2 allows the use of the "lang" and "title" attributes. It should be noted that there is a bug in how E2 parses the title attribute for some tags (including acronym), so if your title contains spaces, you may only see the first word. Below is how your browser displays the example above here on Everything2:

A great site for generating real looking but fake acronyms is: http://brunching.com/toys/toy-acronymer.html and there is a web page that extracts acronym definitions from other web pages at http://cadia.cs.umass.edu/irug/acro/getacros.html There's another system (not on line) described here: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~say1/pubs/tech_report01.ps.gz

So, what we're dealing with here is an "extreme name", which I think is kind of nice. Instead of just picking a random name for something, you go to the extreme lengths of trying to make the initials of a descriptive sentence form a pronouncable word. Very much in the spirit of extreme sports.